Last night, a crowd in Austin surprisingly found themselves at the U.S. premiere of the new Star Trek movie after being duped with promise of a new print of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (and a mere ten minutes of the upcoming film). Of course, this being Aint It Cool territory, there were movie blog people in attendance, and of course these guys have given the reboot glowing reviews. But their praises can’t simply be explained away by the fact that the audience is part of the Trekkie choir, because certainly those fans don’t love every Star Trek movie. Otherwise there wouldn’t be such thing as the “Star Trek movie curse” on the odd-numbered installments.
Maybe they were just positive in their reviews because that’s what these kinds of guys do in situations like this. Think of it this way: if diehard Superman II, Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Empire Strikes Back fans were lured in with the promise of new prints of those films, hosted by Richard Donner or George Lucas or Harrison Ford, and the respective hosts surprised the audience with pre-release screenings of Superman Returns, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or The Phantom Menace, they would have been disappointed and some would possibly have written negative reviews. But if those fans were the type of movie bloggers who post reviews in between uploading photos of themselves with celebrities on Facebook, then there might be something more to it than simple fan-based bias.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these kinds of bloggers, of course. I actually appreciate that they love movies as much as they do. And certainly anybody who criticizes their positivity is only jealous that they didn’t get to see the movie yet. So consider that when reading the following responses:
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The first documentary (that I’m aware of, at least) directly inspired by an unexpected YouTube hit (although I had hoped Thriller in Manilla was going to be about this instead of this), Ben Steinbauer’s Winnebago Man is a portrait of Jack Rebney, the Winnebago salesman whose profanity-filled outtakes for a commercial turned him into a reluctant YouTube star (and, apparently, a subject of controversy — his Wikipedia page has been deleted twice, once for abusive entries, once for incorporating “patent nonsense.”) Below the jump, the original Winnebago Man viral video. Plus, Steinbauer’s answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, in which he confesses to being Austin’s town slut, and also shares a memorable moment involving puke.
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Most 12 year old kids are busy updating their MySpace pages or planning on what they’ll wear to school the next day, but not Emily Hagins. She decided to direct her own feature film about zombies entitled Pathogen after watching a screening of Undead, and Zombie Girl: The Movie is documentary that chronicles her effort from concept to the first screening. Emily’s a local gal, so this movie was a shoe-in for this year’s Fantastic Fest.
Filmmakers Aaron Marshall, Eric Mauck and Justin Johnson stumbled across Emily and her movie when they saw a local ad looking for people who wanted to be zombies in a movie, and when they found out how old Emily was, they decided to do a documentary about the film, which turned into 146 hours of footage that had to be broken down into a digestible size.
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Although a really good short film can catapult a director into feature filmmaking, much like Gil Kenan’s short film The Lark led to the chance to direct the CGI film Monster House for Robert Zemeckis and the just-completed live action The City of Ember , film festivals often show short films that most audiences won’t have a chance to see anywhere else. Fantastic Fest had a shorts playing in front of many of the features, and they also had two separate shorts screenings: Short Fuse for live action shorts, and Animated Shorts for, well… animated shorts. On first glance, the long-titled The Facts In The Case Of Mister Hollow doesn’t appear to be animation, but slowly you come to realize that it’s a series of still photographs that tell a very chilling story. It was my favorite amongst the animated shorts, and hopefully it’ll be seen by more audiences soon.
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Part of the fun of attending Fantastic Fest are the Secret Screenings, which aren’t announced until right before the film rolls. This year there were leaks, whispers and rumors galore, with the most rampant one being that we were going to get treat to Oliver Stone’s W, which sadly didn’t happen. It was have been great to see this on a week that ended with an Obama/McCain debate.
Instead, the secret screenings included The Brothers Bloom, Appaloosa, RocknRolla, and the surprise dark horse in the bunch, Role Models. It definitely sticks out among the entire Fantastic Fest lineup like the Sesame Street “One of these things is not like the others,” and it joins Kevin Smith’s Zack & Miri as the only other raunchy comedy in the Fest. The film stars Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott, and is directed by comedian David Wain, best known for Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten. Check out the review and the interview with Wain and Rudd below.
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The one face that has been prevalent all over Fantastic Fest for the past week, even more so than Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, has been Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo. His movie Timecrimes premiered to U.S. audiences here last year, and was snapped up by Magnolia; there’s now an Americanized version in the works. He’s been at pretty much every single screening, every event, and in every condition: tired, wired, drunk, sober, sleepy, awake.
He doesn’t have a feature film at the festival this year, but he did come with about 90 minutes worth of his short films, and those played as a single screening full of Nacho’s wacky blend of British and Spanish humor. Check out the full interview with him below, where you can also watch several of his shorts.
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Fantastic Fest is hosting four “Secret Screenings” of movies that haven’t been released yet, and the first one unspooled last night to a theater full of people who had no idea what they were about to see. Rian Johnson was in town with a print of his movie The Brothers Bloom, and one lucky audience got to see it several months early.
It’s hard to watch Bloom and not think about the world that Wes Anderson’s films inhabit. Places where people travel by steamship, are always immaculately dressed, and consist of extreme caricatures. Johnson’s first feature Brick had that quality, and The Brothers Bloom has it in spades. It’s a fantasy world that Johnson himself probably wouldn’t mind living in, and I’m sure he’d have a fair share of people willing to follow him. At least one theater full of people last night wouldn’t have minded.
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If distributors came to Fantastic Fest this year looking for the next Timecrimes, and badge holders descended hungry for a peek at the next There Will Be Blood, it’s interesting that one of the most talked about films on the schedule has ended up being not a world premiere, not a surprise preview of an Oscar contender, not an unknown international oddity, and not even, really, a genre film, but a documentary made by an American 25 year-old which has been on the festival circuit for nine months.
And yet, the popularity of I Think We’re Alone Now (otherwise known as The Tiffany Stalker Movie) at Fantastic Fest makes a certain perfect sense, and not just because this audience is accustomed to stories of sexual obsession (usually fictional, usually much gorier). In putting a camera in the faces of two lonely, mentally unwell adults, who are both desperate for the attention but incapable of filtering their stories, director Sean Donnelly has made what could be classified as an exploitation film. But even more appropriate for the venue, it’s an exploitation film tailor-made for anyone familiar with unrequited longing, and it wouldn’t work at all if Donnelly’s genuine care for his subjects didn’t shine through.
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Fantastic Fest announced their film awards late last night, even through we’ve still got three more days of movie watching and alcohol drinking to go. As expected, The Good, The Bad and The Weird took the Audience Award, although JCVD took third place in that category, which continues to baffle me. The much buzzed about Let The Right One In was named best horror film over Donkey Punch and Acolytes, and the Danish film How To Get Rid Of The Others took top award in the Fantastic Features category with Cargo 200 and Ex Drummer in second and third place. Thankfully they gave the wacky and fun Santos a special award in that category.
We’ll have a lot more to say about these films and much more soon, so keep checking back for more festival information and news throughout the week. Heck, I’ve even enjoyed seeing Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at this thing. The complete awards listings can be found after the break.
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Kevin Smith has directed his most emotional film with a decidedly non-emotional title with Zack & Miri Make A Porno. Rife with penis and poop jokes, it’s not really a departure from his entire Askew-niverse, but the film does hit some emotional chords that Smith had only really hit before in Chasing Amy. Granted, I wasn’t a big fan of Clerks 2 (although I loved the original), but I found myself really liking Zack & Miri.
In our in-depth interview, Kevin Smith talks about Jason Mewes’ penis and Ben Affleck’s reaction to it, dealing with the MPAA’s obsession with poop, and how this movie came together. He also talks a bit about his next project, Red State. Don your flak vests and kevlar helmets, because there’s quite a few f-bombs in here, as well as a slew of spoilers from Zack & Miri.
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Believe the hype––at least, to a certain extent. Zack and Miri Make a Porno is Kevin Smith’s all-around high score for the current decade, and as a date movie for the demographic looking for a formula of 5% genuine romance underneath 95% poop and dick jokes, it’s way more fun than the film that made Seth Rogen a plausible leading man, Knocked Up. But what’s really exciting about it is its seemingly autobiographical subtext referencing Smith’s own career –– which, unfortunately, is thrown in the flaming trash can of traditional romantic comedy in the film’s final twenty minutes, but which nonetheless makes Zack and Miri seem more heartfelt than any View Askew production since Chasing Amy.
In a working class suburb of Pittsburgh, in the midst of a realistically icy, muddy, shitty winter, lifelong best friends and roommates Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks, finally proving to me that she’s a different person than Rachel McAdams) work menial jobs and are nowhere near being able to pay their bills. It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and all through the town, everyone’s bitter and desperate to get laid. (Side note: it’s interesting that Smith, currently at his most bloated in memory––before the film, he thrilled the crowd with a story of being so fat that he broke a toilet––has made his most convincing film about the frustrations of being skint.) At their exceptionally depressing high school reunion set to the pop hits of 1998 (Marcy Playground and MASE, finally playlist bedmates once again), Zack and Miri discover from a former classmate’s porn star significant other that they (and Miri’s pair of oversized granny panties) have become accidental YouTube stars. Zack has an epiphany: if people are already looking at their asses on the internet for free, why not get paid for it?
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You know a festival isn’t going to be typical when the opening night includes something called “The World Air Sex Championships.” And yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. While Air Guitar contests have started to become popular all over the world, the Alamo Drafthouse thought they’d take it to the next level by having contests simulate sex with… the air. Surprisingly enough, they didn’t invent the art –– it was imported from Japan, of course. Appropriately, after the US premiere of Zack & Miri Make a Porno, the air sexers took the stage.
Last night was a culmination of 13 months of smaller contests leading up to the finals, and to our virgin eyes it was a sight to behold. You had “The Frenchman” with a French flag painted on his chest, the girl who simulated sex to “Hot For Teacher,” and even a complete troupe of air sexers who came out dressed as, respectively, Sarah Palin (complete with inflatable pig… with lipstick), John McCain, a bulldog, a moose, and a Secret Service agent. I’m seriously surprised that both the performers of that one and us in the audience didn’t end up in Guantanamo for that one.
After the break you can watch some video highlights from the championship at what is definitely not your normal film festival.
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As summer cools down, the movies heat up. In this episode we take a look at what’s coming down the pipe this fall. Sure, some of the season’s movies will be blatant Oscar bait, but we still can’t wait to see what Hollywood has in store.
Yesterday marked the beginning of a week of mutant pigs, autistic kung-fu masters, and Japanese nudity. I’m referring of course to Fantastic Fest, Austin’s genre film destination. We talk to festival programmer Zack Carlson about what to look forward to.
Burn After Reading, the latest offering from the Coen Brothers, won the top box office spot last weekend, but did it win our hearts? We shall discuss.
(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)
0:00 - Intro, listener feedback about The Fall and what we missed at the Toronto Film Festival
4:46 - Fall movie preview
21:27 - Interview with Zack Carlson of Fantastic Fest
31:27 - Burn After Reading
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In this New York Times story (cleverly topped with a 600px wide still featuring Greta Gerwig in a bikini), Michael Cieply reports on Sony Pictures Classics’ plan to premiere the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead first in Austin, and then spread the film out to strategically-selected cities throughout the country before opening the film in New York or Los Angeles. Why do it this way? The implication is that Sony is hoping to benefit from positive word of mouth and blog coverage in college towns, hipster meccas and smaller cities where a recommendation from a friend carries more weight than a film review. But in order to convey that message, Cieply has to implicitly diss the publication in which his story is published. An excerpt:
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